Entertainment

Nook Tablet vs. Kindle Fire: This is War [PICS]

I hope Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was paying attention to the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet unveiling today. If not, he may not know that B&N CEO William Lynch essentially declared war on Amazon’s soon-to-ship Kindle Fire tablet.

It’s not just that the two 7-inch tablets are eerily similar in functionality — if not looks — or that both companies made their name in the retail book space or even that they’re likely shipping within days of each other. No, it’s that Barnes & Noble spent a significant portion of the Nook Tablet rollout attacking the Amazon Kindle Fire.

Rarely have I seen one company so directly assail another’s product. Perhaps my favorite line was Lynch’s description of the Kindle Fire as "a vending machine for Amazon services." In a way, that’s true. Amazon’s Kindle Fire gives easy access to virtually all of Amazon’s consumer-facing products and services. On the other hand, the Nook Tablet does pretty much the same thing for Barnes & Noble, though there is less focus on actually shopping for anything besides books, magazine and movies on the Nook Tablet.

Lynch’s diatribe against the Fire continued throughout the presentation. For every Nook Tablet feature he’d introduce, Lynch would be sure to offer the lesser Kindle Fire counterpoint. The Nook Tablet will ship next week with 1 GB of RAM; the Fire reportedly has 512 MB of RAM (Amazon has never officially specified the exact amount). The Nook Tablet has 16 GB of storage space and a micro-SD slot for up to 32 GB of additional storage. The Fire: no slots and 8 GB of storage.

The Nook Tablet looks almost exactly like the now $199 Nook Color (though the former is slightly thinner), but Lynch was quick to point out that while Barnes & Noble designed its tablet from scratch, Amazon started with the Research in Motion BlackBerry PlayBook as a reference design. The point Lynch was trying to make is that this somehow limits the Kindle Fire.

Though the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet each have 7-inch, 1024-by-600 screens, Lynch explained that Barnes & Noble’s Tablet offers a “Vivid View” IPS lamination display with no gap in the screen manufacturer, for a brighter screen with better viewing angles than screens made without this process, like the Kindle Fire.

Lynch also repeatedly highlighted consumers' ability to walk into any Barnes & Noble store for product support. “Where do you go for support for the Kindle Fire?” asked Lynch. “To Seattle?”

The steady attack on Amazon and the new Kindle may seem odd, especially since Barnes & Noble made the tablet leap ahead of Amazon. According to Lynch, the Nook Color is the number-two best-selling tablet in the U.S. after the Apple iPad. What's more, Lynch said it now sells 27% of all ebooks. These are big numbers and with "millions" of Nook Colors sold, so shouldn't Lynch be sitting pretty by simply offering a strong upgrade to an already successful tablet product? Yes and no. Nook Color is a relatively decent tablet story, but Barnes & Noble still trails well behind Amazon in the ereader market (it has roughly 25%. IDC puts Amazon's share at 51%). This aggressive approach is about getting all those millions who are now caught between their old ereader (or no ereader at all) and a new color device to either switch from Amazon or choose one of Barnes & Noble's devices as their first ereader (one study shows that 15% of those without an ereader plan on buying one within the next six months). B&N can't afford to be coy here, so it decided, instead, to launch an all-out assault on Amazon's offerings. To do so, Lynch focused heavily on all that separates the Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire.

Not So Different

Yet, for all that’s different, this really boils down to a battle of two fairly similar 7-inch Android 2.3 content consumption tablets (neither has a camera). Both offer email and web browsing, though the Kindle Fire has its own proprietary Silk Web browser and the Nook Tablet uses a slightly modified Android browser.

I’ve now seen both devices up close and even got to hold the Nook Tablet — though they would not let me operate the device. Like the Fire, the Nook Tablet offers a bright, consistent, highly navigable interface that focuses on content and does an admirable job of hiding the standard Android interface. Screen colors were bright and consistent even at relatively extreme angles. There’s now a mic (the Nook Color does not have one) that enables one of the Nook Tablet’s niftier features: Read and Record. During the onstage demo, Lynch recorded his voice as he read Winnie the Pooh on the device. It will then play back the recording in-sync with page-turns. The mono-speaker is quite loud and in two separate demos, I could clearly hear the recording over the din of a crowded room. Those recordings, by the way, can be saved to the internal storage or on a micro-SD card so you can share them between Nook Tablets. Unfortunately, it doesn’t store to Nook Cloud-based storage.

As with Amazon’s Kindle Fire, the Nook Tablet does not offer open access to the full Android market. Instead, there’s the curated market, which will launch with 1,500 apps designed to work on a 7-inch screen.

Speaking of differences, there really aren’t many differences between the new Nook Tablet and its predecessor, the Nook Color. The Nook Tablet has the exact same screen but updates Android from 1.3 to 2.3 (Gingerbread). The tablet also adds the aforementioned microphone, doubles the amount of RAM (from 512K to 1 GB) and adds a more powerful 1 GHz processor. The new device is also slightly lighter and thinner that the Nook Color.

For all this, you’ll pay an addition $50. That’s also $50 more than the Kindle Fire, clearly the Nook Tablet’s chief competitor. Is the Nook Tablet a better deal than the Kindle Fire? You are getting more storage space and expandability with the Nook Tablet, but I still think the devices are more alike than not. For example, as content consumption devices, neither offers a camera, and both are Wi-Fi-only.

At this point, two things are clear: We now have two solid contenders in the 7-inch tablet space, but we can’t recommend either one until we get a chance to test both of them, side-by-side, and this is officially Tablet War.

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